


my ghosts like to travel

by elebuu



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: 5.0 spoilers, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Drabble, F/M, Grief, If You Squint - Freeform, Mortal Instants came on and wrecked me again, OH GOD THERE ARE SO MANY OF YOU NOW -weeps-, Post-Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, Self-Indulgent, Soul Gems, True Names, against my better judgment i am posting emet/oc content, and Death; thou shalt die, first Emet fic i've done post-ShB, interpretation of canon ambiguities, multiversal character, postcanon, shoebill theory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 17:43:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19977997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elebuu/pseuds/elebuu
Summary: (so deep into your space);With a crystallised soul and the gift of ferrying the wayward dead, the burden of an eldritch life believed lost weighs strangely on her shoulders. Enough of him is around to see it for himself.





	my ghosts like to travel

**Author's Note:**

> friends made me post it 
> 
> (hello frens)

_ For seven nights and seven days, it did not rain in Jura Fontaine’s dreams.  _

_ The rain had boiled up into clouds of fire, sublimated with sound in the vacuous orchestra of disaster. Her cold hands twitched as they resisted the muscle torpor of dreaming sleep; as the frame chosen out of memory, a body assumed, hafted from aether bound to the smallest of the smallest souls, railed in the deep of another soul’s nightmares.  _

_ On any waking moment, the little construct might have yearned to fall into slumber. She ached at depths and in places no fully human thing could feel; yet, even in the abandon of sleep, Jura, thrice-dead-and-counting, the great Stygian mistake Fontaine could scarce let any of it go.  _

_ Thus was it only in this unwaking trial that the thinly-threaded filaments of Emet-Selch bid visit her.  _

_ No trick of the Light, but many of the eye. The construct introduced to him as Jura Fontaine, O-Warrior-of-Light, put an itch in the brain of such Otherly spirits as himself. Mortal--mostly? Aspected--this way, or that, like a coin tarnished on one side and polished on the other. Nostalgic to look at. Distasteful to behold.  _

_ Dead-alive alive-dead unliving non-dying Light-and-Dark “daughter” of Hydaelyn.  _

_ He had wondered at one time if it were at long last the calling of his bluff--by his own calling; a prank, a pile of masks just to remind him how many of his own he had wasted. And never did the answer get so clear as those so-few times the walls came down between them, and Jura--whatever-she-was--stood in front of him an open door, as immense as her feeble body was small.  _

_ At those times he was patient. And, to his eventual dismay, with a bubbling of hope that snuck past his lance-sharp observation. The impression that she Understood (dare he ask it, dare he form it into the word--Remembered--) something that up until then was little more than a waft, like catching the scent of a faraway hearth from the excoriating frozen breeze of a long, long winter road.  _

_ But so it was that at each of those portal-wide, time-gagged seconds she just as quickly closed--nay, slammed--that door, and he could not decide which reason would be worse: if it were intention, a moment of Fear of the Unknown to counteract an innocence of questions, or if, just as every other slim chance he had found over the ages, he was mistaken, and she neither knew nor perceived the passage of supernal electricity between their spirits.  _

_ Emet-Selch had dared to hope that his waiting would be over; and, he supposed, in a way it was. He was a wraith of himself who’d become a cloud of more of himself than he had carried for epochs.  _

_ The trouble was that the woman struggling to stay in the pyrrhic relief of sleep in front of him, contorted in tears she was not awake to shed, believed that he was dead.  _

_ What was worse still than this--it was through drifting past the remnants of their shared footfalls, too weak to do aught else but listen to the ripples of time and mind, that he had pieced together at last why she so violently trembled with that radiant weapon in her hand; why she stood and fell and stood again without wrath in her face, but with pleading; why her hands had drifted toward the ceremonial claws of his gloves as he felt himself weaken from the physical plane.  _

_ The woman who believed herself his murderer had, at some fate-touched moment or another, begun to love him.  _

_ He did not spend overlong wondering, but did nonetheless wonder, if she loved him even now.  _

_ He stood silent in his coat of feathers during her days, and had come to glean a few more things he might have stood to know ere their first meeting had sent them both ricocheting off their series of preventable tragedies. It was terribly impolite to watch, he presumed, the wind colder in his thin ankles than they had been as a soul--or, he thought, feeling strangely wistful about the thing--the warmly dressed body he had used in their travels together. Before-- _

_ Ah. Emet-Selch--Hades--had had more than enough of Befores.  _

_ Inseparable from the middle digit of her left hand was, he found, a seamlessly fitted ring of illegible sigil writing and a stone he could never see quite clearly set into the band. Though death--a kind of death--had dulled his many senses, he still felt the itching she provoked in him when he tried to focus upon the object. Or, really, overmuch on her. He bristled.  _

_ All he wanted to know, and thereafter he was more than willing to drift into whatever state of being a soul with a splintered belly would enter, was why his senses dared to show  _ **_her_ ** _ to him during their confrontation.  _

_ Once that spat of strangeness was settled, the rest he would chalk up to the fortune they had won themselves. Ah--! Again, with the oneness--again with an Us and not a She and He, dipole moments apart-- _

_ Jura had ceased her bone-rattling shaking. With an undignified puff of feathers, he willed himself out of phase with what he presumed she could sense. Dark hair fell forward from her shoulders as she hung low over herself, a weathered doorframe after a house fire of a woman. Unease crept into his phantom.  _

_ “I saw… a strange rush of wind from the bottom of the chasm, after she fell--” he recalled. A disturbance in the lifestream, by his own wording, and whatever this  _ **_infernal_ ** _ itch she wrought of him might be, it was part of the picture.  _

_ She moved subtly, shifting from her ragdoll weariness into a posture more vulnerable than he’d yet observed. He thought it over again, that most recent hypothesis of his. That she--whatever she was, and irritatingly, ‘human’ was doing a poorly job of explaining it--loved him; and that she believed herself his killer. She sank into embracing herself, her head hanging in the crooks of her folded arms as she wrapped them around herself and slumped forward into the bend of her knees. Not shaking. Not weeping. Not sleeping.  _

_ Though exhaustion had sunk her darkening eyelids closed, he had the strong impression now that Jura knew that he was here, whether it was within her power to qualify her sensation as his own or not.  _

_ He opted not to shift a mote, and waited.  _

_ She’d carried herself with such a simple, practiced, cultured quiet that it had at one time bored him out of his mind. Viewed at eye level ever since--That day--however; her affect did not strike him as flat or vacant but rather the way one behaves with their mind kept politely behind closed doors, conflict behind the curtains be damned. Her behaviour, ritual; her sensibilities, scheduled, tidy, if prone to more than a little of that  _ **_heroic_ ** _ brooding. The only signs of stress in whatever space was ‘home’ at the time were the odd ledger left open, unintelligible ink tracings anxiously drawn over the pages; a saucer, left on a windowsill; a bit of wide, black ribbon gotten loose from her hair, random undulance over the arm of a chair.  _

_ Dreadfully, terribly,  _ **_monastically_ ** _ boring.  _

_ How she managed to seem perpetually undisclosing of something that might otherwise howl with significance was beyond his patience moreso than his imagination. Least of all, why…  _

_ “Charybdis.” _

_ It was a mutter, dry from the inflamed chambers of her voice, and spoken into her arms and their long, understated fabric sleeves, but markedly clear all the same.  _

_ “I should have told you. I should have told you you had it--wrong. But that you  _ **_gave_ ** _ me your true name--and for what?--I can’t--”  _

_ Jura rolled her head side to side, a stifled mimic of disconfirming. “So. It’s Charybdis.”  _

_ She slowly slid off the bed and tried to stand up, earning for her troubles the resentful buckling of one knee, sending her further forward than she likely intended to go. He saw the glassy surface tension over her eyes, never more the colour of churning seawater than they were now. “So now w-we’re even…”  _

_ Emet-Selch concentrated on the memory of long-fingered, willowy hands.  _

_ Although he felt the answers carve themselves out one by one like pomegranate seeds from the hide of his battered heart, he dared to hope she felt the ghosts of his fingertips on hers as she limped by.  _

_ He could  _ **_hear_ ** _ the colour of her rising heartbeats as uncanny drops of hope sprouted out of the dead gasp he’d left behind in her soul.  _


End file.
